Assailed for his efforts, Karsch says to himself, “why go on trying to make the two German provinces better acquainted with one another, why get involved in the low and petty terms with which they took each other’s measure, as though the year 1960 ceases to be shared at the border, why write, answer letters, give information, when these affairs terminate in applause and beer-drinking as after any old entertainment and tales from abroad, when the supposed ‘Jew swine’ finds best regards from the Wandsbeck execution squad in his mail, when gradually the smaller newspapers begin questioning whether this unknown journalist stands for anything representative or morally right, when what you get out of it is having almost every evening to turn down a call to partisan political leadership, thereby winning the contempt of nineteen-year-olds for this cowardly citizen who wouldn’t stand up for anything but his reporting, not for any recommendation”.20 Karsch bales out shortly after the West German police arrive to search his flat on suspicion of treason, landing in Italy, where he abandons his search for difficult truths and lives by supplying West German newspapers with bland “page three”-type features of the kind he had hoped to get beyond with his failed biography of Achim. In 1962 Johnson himself left West Berlin for Italy where he would spend his state-funded year writing in the Villa Massimo in Rome. By that time, however, a different city and country had also laid claim to his attention.
5. NEW YORK CITY: BEGINNING ANNIVERSARIES
“America was a rumour”, so Johnson told the New York Times in December 1966: “I came here to verify the rumour.”1 He had made his first visit in 1961, during which he gave a lecture at Wayne State University, in Detroit, Michigan, attended a seminar at Harvard, and also passed through San Francisco, New Orleans and Oxford, Mississippi, where he sought out a disappointing encounter with his literary hero, William Faulkner (“I am not a literary man”, was just about all the elderly Southern writer was willing to say when his East German admirer eventually caught up with him in Charlottesville, Virginia — that and the deflating observation that “I come here only to go huntin’ and fishin’”2).
Johnson returned to America for a brief tour in 1965, giving readings alongside Günter Grass, and then moved to New York for a much longer period from 1966–68, a visit that was made possible by his German-Jewish expatriate publisher Helen Wolff, who employed him to produce his textbook Das Neue Fenster: Selections from Contemporary German Literature. Keen to participate in the ordinary life of the city, and not to haunt universities as a subsidised ghost in the corridor (he would describe academic life as both a “golden cage”3 and a “nature conservancy park”4), he went to work every day in his office at the publishers and lived with his family in a flat looking out over the Hudson River: Apt 204 at 243 Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side. It was a creative time, in which Johnson got to know some of Wolff’s friends, including the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who lived nearby on Riverside Drive, and researched New York City with the energy he had previously applied to Berlin. He travelled about extensively on the trains and ferries, visiting the night courts as well as the bars, and, with Helen Wolff’s help, joined a couple of City of New York police detectives in their unmarked car as they patrolled the midtown east side area. As Wolff had explained to the Chief Inspector while making this request: “His work is in the tradition of the disciplined realist novel, and he is particularly concerned with the life and problems of ordinary men and women”.5 He took part in the readings and discussions too, joining Hannah Arendt to talk about Walter Benjamin, for example, or speaking to members of the American Jewish Congress, whose agonised and accusing response confirmed something he already knew very well: that no German could escape guilt for the holocaust.
Johnson had never been anything like as ignorant about America as the Polish spy, Pawel Monat who, on first flying into New York City in 1955, had scolded his wife for failing to understand that the air conditioning boxes sticking out of the apartment windows were “obviously dovecotes”.6 Johnson would play a more sophisticated game with that particular misrecognition, placing it on the “dark ravine” of West End Avenue and attributing it to the perceptions of a young bride from South Dakota who is reluctant to move to the area: “but the cages in the windows are not for birds”, he would write, “they’re for air conditioners you have to pay for yourself”.7
Unlike Monat, who may have been a source here, Johnson had lived for years in the West by the time he arrived in New York. He too, however, was fighting false stereotypes: “I am destroying beliefs that everyone has tried to establish in me”, so he informed the New York Times’s Harry Gilroy (who had reported for the paper from Berlin in the late Fifties). Among his independent discoveries, Johnson cited the fact that “people on New York streets are not hurrying, one is not robbed of dignity in a subway crush, people here are remarkably patient — more than I think they would be in Germany”. Having visited Harlem — “without being molested, or even noticed” — he was also, the reporter noted, “profoundly distressed by the inequalities suffered by Negroes”:
“I don’t really understand the attitude of whites to Negroes”, he said. “Whites leave their children in the hands of Negroes. They ride in subway trains confident that the Negro driver will get them there safely. There cannot be repulsion”.
He added that there were good signs of progress in race relations: “Practically everyone I know is for equal rights for everyone”.
Uwe Johnson at Michael Hamburger’s house, South Hadley, Massachusetts, October 1966.
Johnson plainly had some catching up to do in this area. In the GDR, the so-called “Negro” had been a rare visitor — a technician or soldier undergoing training, perhaps, or a refugee from McCarthyism, such as the classically-trained African-American baritone Aubrey Pankey, who moved to the GDR in 1956 after being refused permission to stay in France or Britain under pressure from McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. Johnson, however, would make that effort, both in his commentary for Summer in the City, a film formed around his experience of New York City and directed by the Berlin-born American Christian Blackwood for West German television in 1968, and also in Anniversaries, the vast four-volume New York novel he would write over the following fifteen or so years. Michael Hamburger, the poet and translator who had met up again with Johnson in Massachusetts and then New York in 1966, remembered how he studied the city with “a minuteness particular to him”.8 He also describes him as unusually fearless for a white man as he set off to explore the streets of Harlem — perhaps defended by his “heavy frame”, which combined with cropped hair and leather jacket to give him the “tough” appearance of a Hell’s Angel or a skinhead — a look that had astonished Hamburger when he first met the writer.
Christian Blackwood, Summer in the City.
We can gain some sense of the ambitions Johnson held for Anniversaries by returning to the typescript entitled “Conversation on the Novel…”. Here he explains that he sees the novel not as a miniature or model world but as “a version of reality” that readers are invited to compare and contrast with their own experience. He suggests that its primary cause and justification lies in the basic human need driving people to want to overcome their separation — whether this be caused by frontiers, historical time or social codes. Aware that they live on “an unsafe planet”, readers want “news from their partners”, whether the latter are found in a faraway land, in the distant past or, indeed, just around the corner as neighbours. While they might continue to use chronology as a way of organising his material, the late-twentieth-century novelist must also try to articulate new forms of understanding. They should seek to capture not just the appearance of beauty but also the material processes underlying its production: “a rose is a rose is a rose”, Johnson quotes from Gertrude Stein, yet the flower must also be understood from the point of view of the parks section of the gardeners union. Having cast an eye over the usual texts that might be found on a first-year reading list, Johnson dismisses Abel Chevalley’s otiose d
efinition of the novel as “a narration in prose of a certain length”, and then dispenses just as quickly with E.M. Forster’s unambitious ruling from Bloomsbury that to qualify as a novel it should have at least fifty thousand words. Not so, Johnson told the students: the novel that tries to speak the truth of our time will need a good two million words, and scores of characters. Far from hiding in a single room, or even a considerable country house of the kind Jane Austen might have taken as her setting, it must step out onto the sidewalks, visit police headquarters and find its way into all the world’s hiding places too. It must range widely through cities and countries, taking the entirety of space and, for that matter, of yet-to-be-discovered dimensions as its proper territory. Throughout, it must persist in the pursuit of truth in the understanding that the reader is just as responsible for this effort as the writer.
Johnson got going on Anniversaries in New York, where he stayed for a second year, assisted by a grant of $7,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation, paid through the New School for Social Research, to keep him over the seven months he needed to “complete work on his fourth novel”.9 It would grow into a vast and barely containable monster, fit not just to be “read” in the page-turning manner of the book-buying “consumer” to whom Johnson referred teasingly in his talks, but to be inhabited over a decade or two. Johnson began by releasing some of the “invented persons” from his earlier novels into the American city, and then following them into the work that would become his masterpiece. Various of these semi-autonomous characters from his earlier novels reappear in these pages, included the frustrated journalist Karsch, who, having failed to establish the truth about the GDR’s cycling hero Achim, now turns up in America researching and writing a book about the Mafia. The major part, however, goes to Gesine Cresspahl, earlier encountered in Speculations about Jakob, where she was living in Düsseldorf in West Germany, having left her Mecklenburg home in the GDR, and working as a secretary for NATO. Johnson would speak of having caught sight of her one day in Manhattan — “on the southern side of 42nd Street heading for Sixth Avenue”10 — and of gaining her reluctant permission to reappoint himself the chronicler of her story.
By 1967, when Johnson renews their acquaintance in Manhattan, Gesine is thirty-four years old, and living in a three-roomed apartment that appears actually to have been Johnson’s own on Riverside Drive. She has been in New York since the spring of 1961, and lives with her ten-year-old daughter Marie, the child of Gesine’s brief relationship with the late railwayman Jakob Abs. She has a visiting lover named Dietrich Erichson, a professor who works in defence-related radar, and she herself is now a “foreign languages correspondent”, employed by a Manhattan bank that draws up plans, as the novel develops, to assist the ongoing Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia by advancing hard currency to Alexander Dubcek’s reforming government. For her own sake, as well as that of her smart and already partly-Americanised daughter Marie, Gesine also finds herself wanting to understand more about the traumatic twentieth-century history that has made her what she is. As Johnson remarked in an interview, “Gesine Cresspahl tries to rediscover herself, her parents, her countryside, her language”.11 The conversations in which Gesine and Marie review their family’s history are central to the architecture of the new work.
Anniversaries is not structured like a conventional novel. Determined to use fiction as an instrument with which to investigate the reality of his age, Johnson employs a calendrical form to organise Anniversaries along two intersecting vectors of time and place. In the first, which has been described as “the time of narration”,12 the novel follows Gesine and Marie as they proceed day by day through a year of their life in New York, starting on 20 August 1967, and moving forward through a further 366 dated sequences, one for every day (the translator, Damion Searls, reminds us that Johnson had chosen a leap year), until it closes on 20 August 1968. Along this vector, Johnson provides detailed and close-grained accounts of their everyday life in the city — school, work, the street with its shops, cafes and bars, the parks and the subway, encounters with friends and neighbours, and vacations too. Germany had been divided two ways, but Anniversaries is the book of a city where almost everybody comes from somewhere else, and in which people are learning, or not, to live in the knowledge that others have a different experience both of the city they share and of the world beyond its horizon: “home” or just murder? — as Johnson’s Jewish neighbours on Riverside Drive demand that we keep asking of Gesine’s remembered Mecklenburg.
Gesine’s “days in the year” are richly augmented by her scrutiny of the New York Times, which brings — and sometimes deluges — her with news of the wider events throughout this momentous year, shaped as it is by the Civil Rights Movement, the murders of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the ongoing war in Vietnam. This is history-in-the-making, told as it registers in Gesine’s sharp, sceptical and very Johnson-like eye. She respects the paper — as close as America came, perhaps, to an embodiment of Jurgen Habermas’s idea of the “bourgeois public sphere”13 — but also takes stock of its omissions, biases and silent adjustments of the record. Made into an “omnidirectional ironist”14 by her own experience of displacement, she notes the welcome accorded to Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, when she defects in India and moves to New York, and also the moment when the paper silently introduces a smaller font for the swelling list of young men killed in the Vietnam War. She closely follows the paper’s reports of the ongoing Prague Spring, a momentous upheaval that becomes an increasingly dominant presence in the book — and an encouraging source of hope, too, since it promises the recovery of the political aspirations that Johnson had seen violently crushed in East Germany in 1953 and again in Hungary in 1956. Encouraged by the Dubček government’s apparently honest and accountable response to the death of an American Jewish aid worker, who had ended up floating dead in Prague’s Vltava River, Johnson writes, “then this might really be Socialism — with a functioning constitution, with freedom of speech, with freedom of movement, with the freedom for even an individual to decide how to use the means of production”.15
While remaining attentive to the consequences of the post-war Iron Curtain both in Europe and in Asia, the so-called “poet of the divided Germany” finds a new fault line to investigate in America and New York City itself. As Gesine and Marie go about their business, the “border” that had divided Berlin in Johnson’s earlier novels is augmented by the “colour-line” cut deep into American experience. His interest in this abiding wound is evident in the many newspaper clippings he made while living in New York, now held in the Uwe Johnson Archive at the University of Rostock. It is also embedded in Anniversaries from the very opening scene — set at a coastal resort “on a narrow spit on the Jersey shore” a couple of hours from Manhattan, where “dark-skinned” people are allowed to work as servants but definitely not to buy or rent houses or (thanks to a proscription that is also applied to Jews) to make use of the “coarse white sand”16 reserved for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Gesine has been aware of this fault line since she was looking for somewhere to live at the very start of her residency in New York City. It is there in the high rents demanded for mean and shabby apartments that are, nevertheless, “free of Negro neighbors”17 and she confronts it again when she grabs Marie and fiercely walks out of an office in Queens, slamming the door on a property broker who has tried to tempt her with the assurance, “Don’t worry we keep the shwartzes out”.18
Over the course of the novel’s year the New York Times teaches Gesine how this division plays out in the politics of the city. Through her eyes, we read of the African-American singer Eartha Kitt coming under fire for presuming, on the authority of her own experience of living in both ghetto and gutter, to tell President Lyndon Johnson’s wife why young Americans might be turning to crime (“Because they’re going to be snatched from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam”). We also see the African-American poet Leroi Jones (soon to rename himself Amira Baraka) spitting his fearle
ss contempt back at the white judge who is jailing him for three years on account of the hostility to the Vietnam War expressed in an allegedly inflammatory poem published in Evergreen Review. Gesine notes the reported murders, which may or may not have been fired by racial hatred, and she is also far too attentive to miss the publication of a survey revealing how very few, if any, African-Americans hold significant positions in the media — even the august, superior and liberal-minded New York Times itself can only count three among its two hundred reporters.19
Christian Blackwood, Summer in the City.
Gesine and Marie also make their own more personal attempts to cross the colour-line. They do what they can to befriend Mr Robinson, the Black elevator operator in their apartment building (he turns out to have done his military service in West Germany). They risk the disapproval of neighbours by providing for Marie’s Black school friend Francine, who comes to stay with them for a time after her mother is taken off to hospital following a stabbing. When Francine disappears back across the colour-line, they set out to look for her on the streets, only to make a more general discovery. “Our slums”, Johnson notes of New York City, “are around the corner, and a foreign country”. By the time he wrote this, in the second volume of Anniversaries, both he and Gesine understand “the slum” to be the product of a system of exclusion and discrimination that is actually more mobile than his statement may suggest. Unlike those quarters or estates that may have been deliberately created to house the poor in Europe, “the slums of New York weren’t built as slums; here the slum is like a jellyfish in society, it moves around”.20 He goes on to describe how the “jellyfish” can turn luxury “brownstone” residences, built with fine interior panelling, oak floors and impressive fireplaces, into hellish barracks of degradation with African-American and Puerto Rican families squeezed into single rooms. By this stage in the process most white-skinned immigrants have fled, leaving the place to, say, Mrs Daphne Davis, a slumdweller in Brownsville, Brooklyn, who is reported to have found her infant daughter playing with a rat. “It was so big the child was calling: ‘Here kitty, here kitty’”.21 Recognising that “the slum is a prison into which society deports those who it itself has mutilated”,22 Gesine concludes that, while there may indeed be “individual whites who register the sound of a bottle exploding” next to them on the sidewalk, “the whites as a group do not get the message”:
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